From Publishers Weekly
A novel with a sawbuck of narrators could easily devolve into an unreadable mess, but in Reiken's (The Lost Legends of New Jersey) able hands becomes a compelling tale in which one thread deftly connects 10 people. Beverly Rabinowitz, a middle-aged New Jersey doctor born in Poland during WWII, is taking a vacation trip to Florida with her cancer-stricken boyfriend, David. Beverly's musings while on her trip introduce four characters who will later become narrators: Jordan, David's son; Tim Birdsey, a tour guide/musician; Dee, the lead singer in Birdsey's band; and Jennifer, Beverly's oldest daughter. Characters continue to appear: FBI agent Leopold Sachs; Miriam, a childhood friend and an analyst; Vicki, a veterinarian; and Amnon Grossman, an Israeli soldier accused of murdering a Palestinian boy. The story moves dizzyingly through Florida, Utah, New Jersey, and Israel, among other places, and includes plot lines involving fugitives from justice, the Holocaust, and the Palestinian/Israeli conflicts—all illustrating that observations depend on the observer. An imaginative and exciting read. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
*Starred Review* Reiken follows two acclaimed novels with an intricate, subtly fantastic, six-degrees-of-separation tale shaped by the beauty, continuity, and mystery of nature. During a 1984 trip to Florida, a widowed marine biologist swims among tolerant manatees with his pediatrician girlfriend, a Polish Jew who fled the Nazis. Their young-dude guide, Tim, of German descent, accompanies his bandmate Dee, whose wealthy Utah family is part of a violent cult, on a clandestine visit to see her brother, who is in a coma after surviving a motorcycle accident in Israel. On the plane, Tim sits next to a tall, reserved woman, who may be a 1960s radical turned fugitive from justice with mystical powers. A Massachusetts veterinarian suffering from severe allergies ends up in Israel, where a man working at a nature reserve . . .Well, it’s an entrancing and profoundly complicated tale Reiken tells as he slowly reveals the submerged connections among his intriguing characters while sustaining psychological sophistication, suspense, shrewd humor, and many-tiered compassion. Reiken’s novel of miraculous survival and discovery embraces the earth’s splendor, humankind’s capacity for good and evil, and the fact that we are all linked and that much is concealed within our oceanic psyches. --Donna Seaman
Review
PRAISE FOR THE ODD SEA:
"Reiken strikes a delicate balance between mysteries and matters of fact...By the conclusion of this complex, engrossing novel, the title no longer seems the least bit funny." - Time
"A haunting first novel that takes a horrifying family calamity and turns it into a form of magic...leaves you spellbound until the very last page." - Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times
"Skillful and much more than promising...Mr. Reiken's novel can be considered a coming-of-age story, but it is unusually interesting, because his adolescent narrator is much less self-absorbed than most of his kind." - The Atlantic Monthly
"Reiken has the gift of creating characters whose lives seem to go on even after we have read the last page of the novel." - The Christian Science Monitor
PRAISE FOR THE LOST LEGENDS OF NEW JERSEY:
"By turns funny, poignant, clever and sad, Lost Legends is almost unerringly original...Reiken is an inspired storyteller, shifting gracefully from the ethereal to the earthly, and then meshing the two...You find yourself wishing that Reiken's beautiful, affecting writing and his haunting characters and their stories could go on and on." -The Philadelphia Inquirer (Sunday front page)
"In scene after scene, Reiken gets the amiable melancholy of suburbia exactly right. ... Reiken knows how to charge the quietest domestic scenes with consequence and emotion." - The New York Times Book Review
"A wise book filled with people a reader cannot help but care for." - The Boston Sunday Globe (front page)
About the Author
Frederick Reiken is the author of two previous novels, The Odd Sea (1998) and The Lost Legends of New Jersey (2000). His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker and his essays in the anthology Living on the Edge of the World (2008). He has worked as a reporter and columnist and is currently a member of the writing faculty at Emerson College.
